They claim they are digitizing British newspapers (hundreds) going back to the 1700s. In my first amateur pass at it, I did not find any Tolkien gems, but I am guessing there are some in there. Have some fun, and tell us what you find!

I think all the references that I can see in the papers are OCR (Optical Character Recognition) errors from the scanning. The computer is checking a dictionary for words which must include Hobbit and correcting to that.